Microsoft has once again made a lot of noise about a possible portable gaming device. In November 2024, Xbox CEO Phil Spencer confirmed the company is ‘working on’ a handheld gaming devicebut said it was “years away.” NOW, talk to The edge At the CES tech show, another senior Microsoft employee gave details about what could be a more PC-focused portable device, and possibly as early as this year.
Jason Ronald, who holds the excellent title of Next Generation Vice President, spoke with The edge after a panel titled “The Future of Gaming Handhelds,” where he suggested that Microsoft might also create less of a portable Xbox and more of a portable PC that offers an Xbox-like experience.
The distinction is clearly confusing, especially since the current generation of consoles are essentially closed PCs, and then further blurred by Microsoft’s current campaign suggesting that any shielded device connected to the internet “is an Xbox” via the push of the company towards streaming. . But Ronald seems to want to make a distinction, suggesting that the goal of creating a handheld would be to take the company’s expertise gained over decades of making consoles and integrate it into a Laptop PC. “I would say it brings together the best of Xbox and Windows,” the vice president said. The edge“because we’ve spent the last 20 years building a world-class operating system, but it’s really locked to the console.”
The goal, it seems, is to bring the two together. Or, perhaps more bluntly, to make Windows less painful to use on a small screen. This is something Microsoft hasn’t always been good at. Have you ever owned a Windows cell phone? I did it! Haha! It was so bad. So remember Microsoft’s last great attempt, with Windows 7’s terrible attempt to become tile-based, compromising its entire UI for the desktops everyone was using it on in favor of portable devices that no one was on?
While every tech company in the world is trying to take advantage of the success of Valve’s Steam Deck device and launch their own laptops, Microsoft clearly wants a piece of the pie, but perhaps knows that Windows 11 wouldn’t be enough, and that he would. will never be able to show his face again if he used a Linux-based interface. This is likely what’s driving Donald’s claims to bring the simpler UX of an Xbox to a Windows-powered laptop. However, he is shy and says The edge “We will have much more to share later this year.”
However, what he just said sounded awfully familiar. “I think,” Donald says, “ultimately our goal is to make Windows great for gaming on any device.” It’s a refrain we’ve heard countless times over countless iterations of the operating system. Every new major release comes with a major new advancement to make Windows so great for gaming, and none have ever taken off. (Remember the launch of Windows Vista, which announced a feature that would give your PC’s hardware a rating out of 10 and believed the industry would release games with a matching score so you’d know if it worked? No? Exactly. ) And yet, strangely, Windows has always is the default operating system for PC gaming, inevitably performing much better the more Microsoft tries to get involved.
But, as Donald points out, the Xbox operating system relies on a lot of Windows’ code, so it shouldn’t be a herculean task to transfer its tiled world to a portable device. Obviously it needs to be reworked for a PC such that it never needs a cursor input or a click on a taskbar, and of course the Xbox already handles that, but it’s is largely thanks to all the ways in which it is provocative. not behaving like a PC, with its incredibly limited settings and locked nature. “We’re working on fundamental interaction models,” Donald explains, “to make sure that whatever the details of the operating system, it feels very natively like a gaming-centric device and a gaming-centric experience. on the game.”
So the real message here is: forget about a possible portable Xbox for now, we might just see a portable PC that feels like an Xbox in the year.
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